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> The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of t
by geofft 7y ago
> The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat."
UBI/welfare works very differently in a scarcity economy like the Pilgrims' and in a close-to-post-scarcity economy like ours. In fact, I wonder to what extent we're already post-scarcity, we just don't have the logistics worked out to make it realistic. I think that's a much more interesting question than whether UBI is a good idea in the abstract. It seems to me it's an obviously bad idea when the risk of people not working is an existential threat to your society, and an obviously good idea when it's not.
For instance, if wizards showed up tomorrow with the ability to create unbounded amounts of food, clothing, housing, and medicine, it would make little sense to deny those resources to everyone who needed them.
> Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value. I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea.
I agree with that, but I also think that this already applies to the rich. Once you own a certain amount of money, our existing systems already discourage human labor and encourage you to spend your time re-investing your money, paying other people for labor, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems discourage even that and encourage you to spend your time moving your money to offshore banks, lobbying the government, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems encourage you to spend money trying to just be the government.
So we need to figure out how to cope with a society of people who are disconnected from money in that way, independent of whether UBI is a good idea or not.
Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor - no engineers with windfalls from their employer's IPOs, no business magnates, no trust funds or inheritances enough to pay for more than your college education, etc. Everyone needs to keep working until retirement, and nothing you do will let you retire early. I suspect that option is too politically distasteful to everyone (probably even to myself) to make it viable. (That said, most obvious way to do it is extremely heavy taxation, at which point you can afford a generous welfare state.)
- DoreenMichele 7y agoAlternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor Just for the record: This is not something I'm suggesting and I absolutely don't agree with it. This is part of my mental framework: Americans are slaves to the grind in part because cheap housing options simply don't exist anymore and our health care system has very serious problems with regards to the financial end of things. Addressing those two issues would give Americans real relief. Instituting UBI in the US without first addressing those things would actively discourage the US from trying to address those issues. If you don't address them, no amount of "free money" fixes our problems. This is not argument. I just don't want other people to come through here, read what you have said and go "well, that must be what she means and I'm not for a system that denies people leisure time and retirement." If people want to know what I think, they can ask me what I think (or read my writing elsewhere in some cases). Please don't rely on other people's mental models to decide what I supposedly think.
- geofft 7y agoSorry, yes - I don't mean to imply that's what you think. And I do actually think that's a coherent system, and I personally think that it is in some ways more humane than our current one, so I don't even mean that such a system is negative. I also don't think such a system needs to deny people leisure time and retirement: I did specifically suggest that such a system would involve retirement, just no early retirement. Since the vast majority of people in our current society have that option closed off to them in practice, this doesn't strike me as unjust. As a straw man, let's say minimum wage is N, and taxes cause your net earnings to approach 1.2N asymptotically as you make more and more income. You can apply for government support if you make less than N for good reason, or if you hit retirement age. That puts strong pressure on housing and healthcare to be reasonably priced, because people can't pay more than a certain amount - nobody has it. But it also ensures that everyone, rich and poor alike, must work to eat. (That is, in this system there's no UBI; there should still be some sort of social safety net for people who can't work, but no support is provided for people who can work but won't, until retirement age.) At most, you can take a sabbatical every 6 years, in theory; in practice it'd be less than that. Such a system will strongly incentivize the richest among us to support generous labor conditions (vacations, leave for childcare, etc.) because problems will apply to them just about as much as to anyone else. There are a bunch of practical flaws with this straw man proposal, but I would argue that if we genuinely value the link between how much money you have and your labor, we should be thinking about systems that more closely resemble it than the ones we have now. I'm just genuinely undecided on the value of that link, because I don't have enough information - we don't have a good idea of what a society looks like when you can set up that link and you have copious amounts of "free money" to go around.